Here comes Polly with a shotgun, looking no less dramatic than her sister, even though also fully clothed. When she sees Curtis in the open door, she calls out his name with evident relief.
Maybe he hears relief where he should hear an angrier quality, because as Polly arrives, she levels the pistol-grip 12-gauge at his head and shouts at him. She has every right to be furious with him, of course, for bringing a pair of otherworldly assassins into her life, and he won’t blame her if she shoots him down right here and now, though he might have expected her to be more understanding and though he will be sorry to go.
Then he realizes that she’s shouting “Down, dawn, down,” and finally the word computes. He drops flat to the ground, and she fires at once into the store. She pumps four thunderous rounds before the bad mom, which he had previously wounded, stops shrieking behind him.
Scrambling to his feet, Curtis is so fascinated by the sight of Polly plucking shotgun shells from her cleavage with the flair of a magician producing live doves from silk scarves that he turns almost as an afterthought to peer into the store. Something that will strain the county coroner’s powers of description lies just inside the door, midst the wreckage of a snack-food display rack, and a golden-orange blizzard of shotgun-blasted potato chips, Doritos, and Cheez Doodles slowly settles in salty drifts upon the carcass.
“Are there more of these damn things?” Polly asks breathlessly, having already reloaded the 12-gauge.
“Plenty more,” says Curtis. “But not here, not now — not yet.”
Cass has at last dispatched the second killer. She joins her sister, looking disarranged as Curtis has never seen her.
“The fuel tank’s probably just about full,” Cass says, staring strangely at Curtis.
“Probably,” he agrees.
“We should probably be getting out of here real fast,” Polly says.
“Probably,” Curtis agrees, because although he doesn’t want to further endanger them, he’s even more averse to the idea of heading out from here alone, on foot into the night. “And real fast isn’t fast enough.”
“Once we hit the road,” Cass says, “you’ve got some explaining to do, Curtis Hammond.”
Hoping he doesn’t sound like a sassy-assed, spit-in-the-eye, ungrateful, snot-nosed little punk, Curtis says, “You, too.”
Chapter 48
Caffeine and sugar, in quantity and in tandem, were supposed to be twin wrecking balls of human health in general and destructive to sleep in particular, but Coke and cookies marginally improved Micky’s low spirits and didn’t prevent her eyes from growing heavy.
She sat at the kitchen table, dealing out game after game of solitaire, waiting for Leilani. She remained convinced that the girl would find a way to visit before dawn, even though her stepfather had now been alerted to their relationship.
Without delay, immediately upon Leilani’s arrival, Micky would drive the girl to Clarissa’s in Hemet, in spite of all the parrots and the risk. No time remained for strategy, only for action. And if Hemet proved to be but the first stop on a journey of uncertainly and hardship, Micky was prepared to pay whatever ticket price might be demanded of her.
When eventually even worry, anger, caffeine, and sugar could not stave off drowsiness, and when her neck began to ache from resting her head on her crossed arms upon the table, she carried the seat cushions from the living-room sofa into the kitchen and put them on the floor. She needed to be near enough to the door to be awakened at once by the girl’s knock.
She doubted that Maddoc would return, but she didn’t dare fall asleep with the door unlocked for Leilani, because if the doom doctor did pay another visit, surely he’d come with syringes of digitoxin, or the equivalent, with the compassionate intention of administering a little mercy.
At 2:30 in the morning, Micky stretched out upon the cushions, head next to the door, expecting to lie awake, and fell instantly asleep.
Her dream began in a hospital where she lay abed and paralyzed, alone and afraid of being alone, because she expected Preston Mad-doc to appear, to have his way with her as she lay helpless, and then to kill her. She called to nurses passing in the hall, but all were deaf, and every nurse wore the face of Micky’s mother. She called to passing doctors, who came to the open door to peer at her, but they only smiled and went away; none looked like another, but each was one of her mother’s men who, in her childhood, had known her in ways that she hadn’t wished to be known. The only sounds were her cries and the soft clatter and the mournful whistle of a passing train, as she had heard night after night in her prison cell. With the fluid transition of a dream, she was out of the hospital, aboard the train, paralyzed but sitting up, alone in a long coach car. The clatter of wheels and rails grew louder, the periodic whistle sounded no longer mournful but like a groan of misery, and the train picked up speed, rocking on the tracks. Journeying through blackness of night into darkness of a different quality, she was delivered to the platform of a deserted train station, where Preston Maddoc, at last appearing, arrived with a wheelchair in which she sat in quadriplegic submission as he took custody of her. He wore a necklace of Leilani’s teeth, and held a veil made from the girl’s blond hair. When Maddoc fitted this veil to Micky’s head, Leilani’s tresses draped her ears as well as her face, and she lost all use of the senses thus covered: Struck deaf, mute, blind, denied the faintest of scents, she was left with no perception of her surroundings other than the rolling motion of the wheelchair and the bump of irregularities in the pavement. Maddoc conveyed her toward her fate while she sat unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved.
Micky woke into a warm morning, bone-cold from the repeating dream. The quality of light at the window and then the clock revealed that dawn had come thirty or forty minutes ago.
Having slept with her head against the bolted door, she would have heard even a timid knock. Leilani hadn’t come.
Micky got up from the three sofa cushions, stacked them in a pile, and pushed the pile aside.
With sunrise had arrived the courage to open the door, Maddoc or no Maddoc. She crossed the threshold and stood on the yard-square concrete stoop at the head of the three steps.
Quiet reigned at the house next door. No madwoman waltzed in the backyard. No spacecraft hovered in fulfillment of Maddoc’s vision.
Single file, three crows flew westward, feathered commuters heading toward a morning’s work in the bowers of fig trees or among gnarled olive branches, but none shrieked at Micky from the pickets of the rear fence, as they had harassed her the previous evening.
At that fence, the snarled skeins of thorny rosebush trailers prickled the skin of the morning, and a sparse distribution of sickly leaves mocked Geneva’s gardening. But among these familiar barren brambles, three enormous white roses, tinted peach along each petal edge by the ascending sun, greeted the day with slow, heavy nods.
Micky went down the steps and crossed the yard, amazed.
For years, the bush had failed to bloom. The previous afternoon, not one bud, let alone three, could have been found anywhere within this punk-stubborn mass of unruly thorns.
Closer inspection revealed that the three big roses had been snipped from another garden, no doubt elsewhere in the trailer park. With green ribbon, each flower had been secured to this Little Shop of Horrors plant.
Leilani.
The girl had managed to sneak out of the house, after all, but she hadn’t knocked, which meant that she’d given up all hope of help and that she was reluctant to risk focusing Maddoc’s wrath on Micky and Geneva more than she’d already done.